Inside Health

VITAL SIGNS: DISPARITIES

VITAL SIGNS: DISPARITIES; Skewed Toll of a Curable Disease

By ERIC NAGOURNEY

Published: May 18, 2004

Hundreds of thousands of young Americans are infected with chlamydia, a venereal disease that can be cleared up with a single dose of antibiotics, researchers say.

''The high national prevalence of chlamydial infection suggests that current screening strategies have failed to control this easily curable sexually transmitted infection,'' says a study in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

The researchers also reported that the disease was much more likely to be found in blacks, especially women, a difference they called ''disturbing.'' The infection rate was more than six times as high among young black adults (about 12 percent were infected) as it was among whites (just under 2 percent.)

The disparity may be another example of inequities in medical treatment for blacks and whites, said the study's lead author, Dr. William C. Miller, an infectious disease specialist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The researchers found, for example, that many of the white teenagers in the study reported having been given antibiotics for problems like acne. The medicine could also have taken care of any chlamydia infection.

Chlamydia is a leading cause of infertility and pelvic inflammatory disease, as well as of ectopic pregnancies, which occur disproportionately among black women.

The study looked at test results for more than 14,000 people, ages 18 to 26, across the United States. It found an overall infection rate of about 4 percent (4.7 percent in women, 3.7 percent in men).

The infection rate was higher than that estimated several years ago by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That estimate, unlike the current study, relied on reported cases instead of screening a large population.